The Big R-Book

♣2♣The Scientific Method and Data

The world around us is constantly changing, making the wrong decisions can be disastrous for any company or person. At the same time it is more than ever important to innovate. Innovating is providing a diversity of ideas that just as in biological evolution might hold the best suited mutation for the changing environment.

There are many ways to come to a view on what to do next. Some of the more popular methods include instinct and prejudice, juiced up with psychological biases both in perception and decision making. Other popular methods include decision by authority (“let the boss decide”), deciding by decibels (“the loudest employee is heard”) and dogmatism (“we did this in the past” or “we have a procedure that says this”). While these methods of creating an opinion and deciding might coincidently work out, in general they are sub-optimal by design. Indeed, the best solution might not even be considered or be pre-emptively be ruled out based on flawed arguments.

Looking at scientific development throughout times as well as human history, one is compelled to conclude that the only workable construct so far is also known as the scientific method. No other methods haves brought the world so many innovations and progress, no other methods have stood up in the face of scrutiny.

scientific method

The Scientific Method

Aristotle (384–322 BCE, Greece) can be seen as the father of the scientific method, because of his rigorous logical ...